Posted
by
timothyon Friday August 27, 2010 @11:28PM
from the those-naughty-republicans dept.

John3 writes "Searching Google Maps for the Lincoln Memorial is returning the location of the FDR Memorial instead. Conservative bloggerssmell a conspiracy since Glenn Beck is holding his 'Restoring Honor' gathering at the Lincoln Memorial tomorrow (August 28). Notes for the map listing on Google state 'This place has unverified edits'; so, did someone claim the listing and edit the location?"

REAL AMERICANS unfortunately have trouble finding the United States on a map, much less a famous landmark. Remember that famous botch job by the Miss America contestant? Because her answer was so stupid most people didn't notice that the question was: why can't 1 in 5 Americans find the US on the map? Yes, I'm an American. Yes, I'm embarrassed by that.

I'm a European, and I thought there was evolution in the USA when you lot elected Barack Obama.
After Rupert Murdoch and your "Tea party" votes his party out in the midterm elections coming November, can you make sure he steps down and looks for employment here?
We've got an economic crisis going, on and could do with a good prime-minister (in both countries I've lived in). Apparently we appreciate him more than you, so give him to us:-)

Please tell me you got that information from somewhere other than a Miss America contest, because according to National Geographic, the 94% can find it [nationalgeographic.com] (look on page 26). I'm open to different surveys of different population segments giving different answers, but if your source of information is really a Miss America contest, that's sad.

Yes. 6% is acceptable. I mean, 100% would be nice, but that's just not going to happen. 6% of respondents may have not taken it seriously, been insane, provided an answer that was unintelligible, meant to say "The US" but accidentally said something else, left the question blank on accident, found the question insulting, been drunk or high, etc or some combination thereof.

It also says at the top that "The margin of error for the total sample is +/- 4.4 percentage points at the 95% confidence level."

How does that 6% compare to other countries? I'm guessing it's not that different from many others, and probably a lot higher than many countries with lower education.

Your study only samples people 18-24, and also concludes that 50% can't find friggin' New York State on a map. That study doesn't exactly help your cause as much as you'd like to purport, especially when the detailed findings say:

However, it is concerning that one in ten of those with up to a high schooleducation cannot identify the U.S., and one in five cannot find the Pacific Ocean.

Is that MOST people suck at it. Europeans like to laugh at Americans because they generally know the correct locations of more countries... Forgetting that America is bigger than Europe and knowing the correct locations of some states would be the same relative amount of knowledge. Their geography outside of that area is usually fairly limited. Most know where the US is since it is large and in the news a lot, but often little more.

For example I guy I chat with online from the UK had visited Brazil and was thinking of visiting the US. He wanted to know where various people he knew lived so he could decide if he was going to try and visit. I knew there was a good chance he didn't know where Arizona was since it doesn't make the news a lot (the new anti-immigration bill non-withstanding). So I told him it was "Just east of California, and just north of Mexico." He said that didn't help. I though he meant he didn't know where California was so I clarified. No, he didn't know where MEXICO was. He thought it was in Central America, near Brazil.

Thing is, geography is just kinda boring. It is route memorization, and not all that necessary to most people. This is even more true now, what with maps online and so easily accessible. If you need to know where something is, from a countries down to a street, it is easy to locate.

I also get a little tired of geography snobs because it is exceedingly rare that someone can properly locate all the countries in the world. Never mind the amount of time spent, most people lack a memory that accurate. So when people get snobby about parts of geography but can't do other parts, to me that is just saying "What I know is important, what everyone else knows isn't."

This is all very true of course. As a UK native, I don't know where many of the states are relative to each other. There's an episode of Friends (yeah, yeah, we all watch it sometimes...) where Ross gets increasingly annoyed because he can't even list all the states.

I've been to Belize, for example, but when telling someone about it forgot that it was in Central America, not South. I think geographical knowledge grows slowly as you get older - and visit more countries.

However, there is sometimes the impression that US citizens know more about the geography of their own country than of others around the world. I suspect that Europeans who know where all the countries of the EU are (and yet miss many states) also know where, say, Korea is. Or Saudi Arabia. The attitude of "what I know is important" is annoying - but surely there is a middle ground between listing ALL countries and having a balanced knowledge of the whole world.

Frankly, many foreigners will not know where states are because - as you say - they "don't make the news a lot":) They aren't individually important in the world, unlike the US as a whole.

In my travel around Europe (back when I had the freedom to do that), I found few Europeans who knew much about North American geography. That includes the semester I spent at university in Scotland. OK, they knew Canada, US, Mexico, bunch-of-little-countries, but litte more detail. New York, Florida, and California seemed to be the only states most people knew (or visited). I'm from Michigan and when that name drew blank reactions, I tried explaining that it was the one in the middle of the Great Lakes,

Knowing what states border mine is significantly more important than knowing where a random state is, is significantly more important than knowing where a random country is -- none of which are terribly important at all.

The fact that more than 6 out of ten American young adults (18 to 24) can't find Iraq on a map of the middle East [nationalgeographic.com], that 20% of them think Sudan is in Asia [wikipedia.org], and that almost half think that the majority population in India is Muslim, doesn't have any deleterious foreign policy.

And I've got a bridge for sale. (Don't be bothered by the fact that it's no where near any river, valley, or other geographical feature that the requires bridging...)

And this map doesn't even include Alaska...which is almost half the size of the US mainland.

Your comparison of total area is correct (continental Europe and the US are of similar size), but you really need to start looking at better maps. Alaska is under 670K square miles. The contiguous 48 states (aside: Alaska is part of the mainland) are over 3100K square miles, about 4.7 times the size of Alaska. Maybe you've been looking at too many Mercator-projection maps, which exaggerate the size of northern are

Well, I stopped taking any geography when I was 13, such choice being a luxury of a non-National-Curriculum school. Some of what came under geography, e.g. resource mining and the worker issues surrounding it, was very interesting to me. But labelling of countries was not stimulating. I remember doing the British equivalent of memorising all the English counties etc. one evening, but today I have to, "Where's that?" for most of them. My brain just doesn't care what or where Northumbria (Northumberland?) and Wessex are. Perhaps it's related that I also hate jargon for its own sake - there seems to be so much of it now computing has become "cool". In both cases, it's all political/marketing.

However, I don't think people mock the US citizens simply because they are ignorant about the world. The frustration arises because US citizens are ignorant about the world while its elected government exerts tremendous influence on the world. If your democracy is at war, something is very wrong if a lot of citizens don't know where most of the troops are deployed (I would say "which country you're fighting against" but we're having one of those 1984 style wars against no-one and everyone). If your representatives think that Iran is a menace and potentially a good target for war, it should be because you (as a group) generally think the same. If you know nothing about Iran except that women don't get to wear bikinis and that Ahmadinejad hates Israel, something is broken.

Maybe that's why you are frustrated, or your friends, but I've met a lot of Europeans who are quite proud of their knowledge of geography, over Americans. They like to brag that Americans don't know that Yugoslavia broke up as a country, and stuff like that. At first it annoyed me, then I started making references in passing to El Salvador (since I lived there), and when they didn't know where it was, I would say, "Yeah, Europeans aren't very good at geography." That really annoys them and makes me laugh.

It may be an issue only of Europeans that visit America, because I haven't seen the same thing when I talked to Europeans in Europe, but I'm willing to bet that Europeans are also similarly ignorant of politics. How many know the details of the treaty of Lisbon? What percentage typically vote? While you and your friends might, I'll bet most people don't.

Because major game developers go on field trips to actually see the place for themselves. They didn't use Google Earth...:)Though suddenly I really want to see Google Wasteland... any mashup artists in the house?

As soon as a read this I realised I already knew it from somewhere, despite being having never set foot in the US.
Turns out Fallout 3 is a more reliable source than Google Maps.

True, but I remember that area as crawling with super mutants. I would recommend that anyone going to the Lincoln Memorial to take along at least a chinese assault rifle, or prefereably stop off at the Museum of American History to pick up Charon and give him a minigun.

Real patriots would also buy my Lincoln memorial medallion. Made out of solid zinc, electroplated in the purest of copper. This handsom medallion will look stunning in your change bowl. Only five dollars each plus shipping.

Hah, that was actually a very sucessfull scam in the UK, IIRC in the 50's the scammer adverstised a copper medalion of the Queen mounted on walnut to commerorate her corrination, the mail order price was 10 pounds. What you got was a penny glued to a small piece of walnut. He sold thousands of them and was eventually taken to court where he won the case.

The Washington Monument was started while Washington was still alive, thus, it is a monument, NOT a memorial.

THAT IS AN ABSURDLY MULTIFACETED FALSEHOOD

The semantic difference between 'monument' and 'memorial' is wrong and work on the Washington Monument (which is a National Memorial) did not start until long after Washington's death in 1799.

While a nearby location (now the location of the Jefferson Pier) was specified for a monument featuring Washington in L'Enfant's 1791 city plan, that monument (an equestrian statue) was never built. A different plan for a monument (in the Capital itself) was authorized i

Google doesn't have that accurate a source of landmarks, so they've left them as Wiki-style editable. With such a politically charged event scheduled for tomorrow, it doesn't take that many Beck-dislikers to toy with navigation... anybody trying to find the rally with an iPhone will get the wrong directions if this is allowed to stand.

anybody trying to find the rally with an iPhone will get the wrong directions if this is allowed to stand

uh no. dc resident here. you can see the lincoln memorial from the FDR memorial. while this google thing is odd, yes, if you can't find the lincoln memorial while you are standing around confused at the FDR memorial.. you have bigger problems to worry about.

Decided not to moderate and simply prove you wrong. One idiot making stupid comments doesn't mean the tea party are racists as a group no more than some leftist anarchist looting stores makes all liberals into whackjobs. Frankly, I call anyone who says otherwise a racist themselves.

Certain groups are terrified of what the Tea Party stands for, and they've played the race card in order to try and stop it. The fact that you believe it and espouse this shit means you're just a mindless patsy that can't think for yourself.

From the people I have talked to at the one Tea Party I happened to walk by on lunch break I found out most of them are decent people who have some conservative leanings, but mostly have Libertarian or "Classical Liberal" Leanings. Sure there were some far right wing nut bags in the group but they were VASTLY out numbered by people who, if you put them on a political scale were far more libertarian than full on democrat or republican.

Plus they didn't wreck the place and leave a mess after the rally unlike other groups whom I have seen leave a mess in their wake.

Let these people protest, they aren't hurting anyone yet. To say they are evil and scum is wrong for now. Give them the benefit of the doubt and let's see what happens. I would have thought that a lot of the people who once decried their right to protest and assemble are the same people who are now looking to demonize these people are making themselves look like hypocrites they are. Judging the Tea Party people this way would be like instituting a "pre-crime" policy and arresting anyone in sight whom the police "think" might commit a crime. It is wrong.

If the Tea Party Rallies were doing some of the same things that the Anarchists were doing at their rallies I could see the point of what the talking heads are talking about how "bad they are". So far from all of the B-roll footage I have seen on TV of all of the tea party events I have yet to see the police throwing tear gas and mass arrests of protesters. I have yet to see people being beaten up and people running away with bloodied brows. I have seen the occasional weird screwball sign, but last i heard we still have a the First Amendment as part of our bill of rights.

I will be watching tomorrow on C-SPAN and see it for myself, I am not going to listen to the pundits on either MSNBC (who will make jokes about sexual acts between two consenting men) or Fox News (who will be inflating the number of people in attendance). I will reserve judgement because it is the correct thing to do. I am keeping my "jump to conclusions mat" in it's box.

Reading through the comments, I'm surprised by some of the people who use the pejorative, "teabagger". For example, I gather here that you favor the "liberal" libertarian yet despise the very similar "tea party" libertarian because they have a slightly different (what you term "opposite") belief priority.

While I can understand how you got that impression from his comments, I don't think Tea Party activists in general are the same as libertarians. It's more than an ordering of priorities from what I've seen. The libertarian party is about personal freedoms for everyone even people they didn't like. They wanted to reduce government size to maximize personal freedom.

While saying a group that wants to reduce government size is the same thing with different priorities... I haven't seen the personal freedom part of the Tea Bagger movement. Sure, they talk about freedom, but when questioned they always seem to be interested in their own freedom while opposing freedom for others. Many oppose simple freedom of religion, for example, not to mention individual freedom based on sex and sometimes even race. Where are the freedom loving tea Party activists that want to legalize gay marriage, polygamous marriage, and any other kind of marriage to get the government out of making religious choices for people? I've seen more of them express the opinion that the government should be making interracial marriage illegal than gay marriage legal. That's bigger government, not smaller.

Actually, from what I've seen the Tea Party seems to be a corporate sponsored movement designed to appeal to people's fear and prejudice and to the previously built "us versus them" political mentality, with the goal of preventing the government from effectively regulating and stopping the worst practices of big businesses, whether that is to poison our land and people for profit, or leverage wealth disparity to bleed the poor and middle class using capital as leverage. I sympathize with some people who associate themselves with the Tea Party. I don't like either of the major parties either... but I just don't think the movement itself is sane or cohesive and I think it is directed by advertising agencies with ulterior motives. I mean seriously, they're supposedly a movement that is about overcoming the two party system and breaking free of it, yet they only ever support candidates who were republican and they have never even mentioned (to my knowledge) electoral reform to actually do something about opening things up to non-republican and non-democratic candidates. That's a lot more than a reordering of priorities. That's fundamentally different philosophy.

Looks like you caught on to the point of my post, though you seem to see less malice in the characterization of the Tea Party as racist. I disagree regarding that.

I only know three, but every "tea partier" I personally know is an older white person who harbors what I would call..."ethnic animosity".

I don't think you're going to find an older person - white OR black - that doesn't harbor racial animosity on some level. In fact it has been said by many different people that we all harbor at least some prejudice against those that are different from us. The point is that just because there's a large group of predominately white people, it does

toadlife's experience mirrors my own, except I know a few more tea partiers then him (or her), and they are all high-income with a good deal of "ethnic animosity", quite seriously considerably past any desire of mine to continue associating with them, much less voting for any of their causes (almost all of which turns out to be based on provably false dogma).

So how many people is that? Five? Ten? And you're willing to generalize to a large group, that you happen to disagree with from the start and know little about, based on this huge sample of people you claim to know? You know what this sounds like to me? Brazen hypocrisy. Now, don't get me wrong. I indulge in it every so often myself. But the "the whole group is racist because I know a couple of people" argument is ludicrously hypocritical. Maybe even a tad bit idiotic.

Deficit went up during Bush years and no Tea Party movement: check. Legislation deemed terrible based purely on page numbers (costs are if anything going to be positively affected, but hey, we won't know for sure until 2020) vs terrible legislation based on what it says: check. Calling Obama "brazen" after Bush is comical (and no Tea Party during Bush). Basically you are (by association) a bigot.

As for the taxes. Has it occurred to you that it is sometimes socially useful that individuals have a net disincentive to increase their wages? For example, the salaries (and boni are just disguised salaries) of Wall street bankers are disproportionate to their social utility, which would be fine if such salaries were not an elicitation to pursue careers in finance despite inclinations towards medicine or engineering or fundamental science, for which there is a lack of qualified workers.

Some citizen paying net taxes, in fact a minority of citizen paying net taxes, is a necessary result for a society which is increasingly unequal: given a minimum standard of living rising with inflation and average income levels, more and more people will find themselves under the line as a vanishingly small minority syphons off all the income of the country. This cannot be fixed unless taxes are redistributive, or there are no taxes. Now you may think of no taxes as a good idea, but...

That is why, mechanically, your argument about taxes makes no sense: it just happens that way, automatically, unless there are no taxes. But morally? it is not a question of people having earned their money: at some point, objectively, they haven't. If the share of the income of the richest grows, and the absolute income of those under is stagnating or receding (as is the case) what you are witnessing is robbery on a grand scale.

But does it matter? Well, if all a significant part of the goods and services only go to a small minority of the potential customers (only they can afford these) then your economy swings with the mood of a small number of people. This means repeated booms and bust, great instability, even more inequality, and eventually a descent into societies looking like these of Latin America. And let's face it being rich in America is nicer than being rich in Brazil precisely because the people around you are rich enough that they don't want to kill you for your wallet.

My conjecture: Most of the tea party folks got involved because the president doesn't look like them. And that scared the hell out of them.
Disprove that.

Proof: you don't supply evidence to support your conjecture. Give the absence of evidence to distinguish between that hypothesis and the null hypothesis (that there is no measurable difference in racial attitudes between the tea party folks and the general population), one cannot rationally accept the conjecture.

Uh huh. While I don't care if someone wants to sink a lot of money into a propaganda tool such as the infamous "ground zero mosque" (the building probably transfers resources from authoritarian Middle East powers and transfers it to the US economy, something I see as a net benefit), I can't help but view statements as the above with a cynical humor. If these people were really interested in "national unity", they probably wouldn't have put that building with the role it has there. They probably just want to get their narrative into the 9/11 myth and a nice building is classier than billboards.

I don't think you have even though for a moment about the perspective of muslims in the US. Imagine your religion was being branded as extremist and violent despite 99.999% of the followers never acting out of violence. It's like branding christians as violent extremists because of what has happened in northern Ireland. How would you take a stand and show the people that your religion itself and most followers aren't violent and dangerous, but peaceful and very willing to work with others of other religions to help society?

Sure they started building a community center near the site of the 9/11 attacks, as a way to foster unity and help educate people and show people that the muslim religion can be a force for good things in a community. It's not like they expected it to be a major political issue because there are already dozens of them in the area, just as close.

Rather, this has become a propaganda war by fear mongers who want to brand the entire religion as evil, and want to go so far as to overthrow basic freedoms of our society in order to have a boogey man. If you oppose their right to put a mosque or anything else there, you are opposing the foundation of our country, personal freedom, political freedom, and religious freedom. Anyone who has read the works of the founding fathers and hasn't just read bits out of context and ignored the rest, has to acknowledge that truth.

And as for transferring money out of the middle east from "authoritarian middle east powers" clearly you must only be getting your news exclusively from Fox, the only station that hasn't covered the source of the funding is primarily the Kingdom Foundation run by Prince Al-Waleed bin Talal, who is also the second biggest Shareholder in News Corp (Fox). He's not particularly an authoritarian, but rather has acted fairly middle of the road, as a business man and donating to charities that help bridge cultural gaps between the east and west.

The only people I see objecting to the community center are people who also seem to be in favor of expelling all muslims fro the US and who are so scared they think it's a good idea to abolish religious freedom in the US... while being ignorant or completely without perspective on the ramifications such an action would have.

Looking at specific searches, searching for the Lincoln Memorial gets you the FDR Memorial, but searching for the Lincoln Monument gets you the Lincoln Memorial.I would imagine that it's simply a matter of the word memorial being attributed to FDR more than Lincoln, for some reason.

You are correct, Wikipedia is not the arbiter of names, but in this case I would have to say that the US National Parks Service, which runs and maintains all of the federal memorials, is the one who would set the official name. According to the US National Parks Service it is indeed the "Lincoln Memorial [nps.gov]".

Really, if a self-proclaimed conservative—a jingoistic, flag-lapel-pin-wearing, Go-America!-shouting patriot—a dyed-in-the-wool, red-blooded American doesn't know where the Lincoln Memorial is and can't remember a penny long enough to figure out what it looks like while in Washington, DC, he or she might as well give up right there and then, thrown down his or her misspelled, Obama-Iz-An-Atheest-Moslim-Commie-Crony-Of-Wall-Street-Not-Main-Street signs, exchange his or her copy of Going Rogue for a Socialist party membership card, and get in line to be shipped off to the FEMA internment camps, because some re-education is patently and sorely needed.

Real Americans know the public parking garage under the city buildings on North Highland Street, about 2 blocks from the Clarendon metro stop are free on on weekends, and then its only like 4 or 5 stops on the orange line till you're at Smithsonian. Parking in D.C. is impossible, you're likely to get a ticket for being 30 seconds past a meter, and they have a tendency to tow you onto the side walk. People who don't know that they do that then think you're a dick and got the ticket for parking on the sidew

Specifically, they are part of plank 6 of the 10 point program of Communism [wikipedia.org] in the Communist Manifesto. Although, it also states "These measures will of course be different in different countries.", and without assuming the reasons why we make these decisions, you must agree that we are on a road of which Marx would have approved.

They can't get off the Metro at Smithsonian. They've been specifically warned (by some expert patriots from Maine) not to take the Orange Line or the Blue Line except in the safer areas of Northern Virginia. (I've read so many articles about this that I can't give you a cite--might have been Huffington Post...). The best they're going to be able to manage is the Red Line (authorized as safe) to either Metro Center or Farragut North. They're supposed to be safe on the Red line. They're to avoid the Green Lin

To the few people here who apparently believe paranoid conservative conspiracy theorists vandalized Google to obscure the location of this rally: are you completely insane?

I mean, follow the bouncing ball: you're so paranoid that you'd like to hide the location of a giant rally by desecrating Google maps, but you've scheduled said rally at a landmark so famous tens of millions could find it with no maps at all? And how are fellow paranoid conservatives supposed to find said rally? Does Glenn Beck's web page include coded directions, decipherable only by clues so small you'd never notice them if you hadn't read Ronald Reagan's autobiography twelve times?

You may think Glenn Beck listeners somewhat clinically paranoid and/or politically foolish, but you don't look any smarter, more rational, or less paranoid in believing them both smart enough and rationally motivated to vandalize the map but otherwise too stupid to tie their own shoes.

I have a relative that lives several miles from the Grand Canyon, and told me the story of a local who one day ran into a lost tourist, looking for that gorge. He gave the tourist directions, and the tourist asked, "how is it?" The local had to reply, "I don't know I've never been there. I've been planning to go one of these days....."

They talked for a bit and soon found out the tourist was from New York. The local said, "Oh, I've been there. I visited the statue of liberty." The New Yorker said, "Oh, yeah. I've been planning to go there one of these days....."

The Statue of Liberty trip is practically an in-joke among New Yorkers. Many (most?) New Yorkers have never been to it, though everybody can see it when you're driving around the bottom of the FDR or West Side Highway. I actually have a beautiful view of it from my living room (I live right on the Hudson River), and have never actually taken the ferry to the Statue of Liberty proper, though I once took a ferry trip to Ellis Island, and that boat took us around the Statue for a fairly close look.

The lines to take the ferry to Liberty Island are ridiculously long on weekends (like 3-4 hours), I walk by them every weekend on my morning walks through Battery Park, so unless you have a weekday off in the city, it actually takes as long to go to the Statue of Liberty as it does to drive to Boston.

Same reason I've never been to the top of the Empire State Building - ridiculous lines.

Glenn Beck is a national talk show host, trying to encourage out-of-towners to go to his rally this weekend. That's why this Google flaw is relevant to geeks nationally... it's showing how a political event can be disrupted by those who disagree with the event's sponsor with a simple misinformation attack on Google Maps.

As another poster pointed out with the China angle, your statement is laughable, sir. It would be more accurate to say that Google tries to downplay politics, but the company is neck-deep in politics every day.

Glenn Beck is getting the message not to piss off those who contribute to Wikis.

We're all getting the message that some Wiki contributors are throwing a temper tantrum because Glenn Beck is, horror of horrors, holding an assembly in front of the Lincoln Memorial. You know, like other people have been doing for years. What a crime, eh?

You do realize that they aren't censoring Chinese search results, right?

They were originally, like everyone else, but currently they are not. Google.cn just links you back to Google.hk for searches, and Google.hk is unfiltered. You still have to contend with with the Great Firewall, of course, so having uncensored results doesn't mean you can access censored material -- but at least you know what you aren't being allowed to see.

Don't be a toolbox. Red State makes no mention of a conspiracy, and WTH is "Moonbats" anyway? A real leading conservative blog there. Beck is an entertainer, not a serious voice, yet so many on the left and right moon over him. The summary is just a another smear of conservatives, and since that fits your world view filled with hatred you consider it valid.

Oh shit they're on to us. Come on guys, like we said at the last meeting of the Evil Liberals Who Hate Freedom League, you got to be more careful. Today it's the bloggers, tomorrow it'll appear in forwarded e-mails in 80 point comic sans font, then we're really screwed. Before you know it, they'll break out the ALL CAPS, which as we all know everything is absolutely and unquestionably true if it appears in ALL CAPS.

Also remember: we're forcing people to get gay married and buy health insurance, not hide the Lincoln Memorial. Stay on message guys.

Before healthcare reform conservatives/right wingers were bitching and moaning about "poor/cheap/unemployed/lazy" uninsured people bringing down the system and raising costs for insured citizens because they can always get healthcare, insured or not. This bill forces them to get insurance.
If complaining right wingers really want to fix the problem, they should propose a law banning all healthcare for uninsured citizens who can't pay out of pocket. See how well that goes over.

Before healthcare reform conservatives/right wingers were bitching and moaning about "poor/cheap/unemployed/lazy" uninsured people bringing down the system and raising costs for insured citizens because they can always get healthcare, insured or not. This bill forces them to get insurance.

This bill forces everyone to buy insurance whether they want to or not, and worse, forces them to buy it from a private third party under penalty of law. Not even the most extreme reading of the Commerce Clause justifies that, and I look forward to your excuses when SCOTUS throws the mandate out as unconstitutional.

If complaining right wingers really want to fix the problem, they should propose a law banning all healthcare for uninsured citizens who can't pay out of pocket. See how well that goes over.

If we really want to fix the problem... to the extent that it can be fixed... then we'll propose what we've proposed for years... for Congress to use the Commerce Clause in what is actually a productive, Constitutional manner and ban states from restricting interstate health insurance competition, which most of them do. This is one of the few issues where the states are wrong about the 10th Amendment. The states don't have a right to tell me I can't buy from a company in another state, and opening up a national market would mean national risk pools. Health insurance would then become more like car insurance. If car insurance were restricted by the states in the way that health insurance is, then no one could afford to drive either. There's a real market for auto insurance, though.

As for your concern about the poor, I might be moved more if I didn't suspect that your solution was probably "let the government handle it". You can help the poor without screwing the rights of everyone else, which this "reform" bill did. Further, this isn't an issue of "the poor", and never was. The poor have had access to paid healthcare for years. That's what Medicaid is, after all. In addition to that, most states have a program for uninsured children if you don't meet the poverty criteria but still have limited income. In Alabama it's called AlKids. The real issue is affordable health insurance for the not poor-and yet-not rich. Which *gasp!* a real market would go a long way towards helping.

This bill forces them to get insurance.
Yes, and us right-wingers will still complain about healthcare reform, because forcing people to buy insurance doesn't reform the healthcare industry, it gives money to the insurance companies. For a lot of people, the cost of healthcare insurance is so high, that it is crippling. Before I cancelled my policy at work, I was paying $800 a month for insurance. Of course, with copayments and coinsurance, if we went to the doctor, we would still owe another hundred doll

I'd suspect that this sort of thing would work/better/ on Democrats than Republicans, being how Democrats are younger, hipper, and more apt to use Google where as most Republicans probably have a paper map of DC around somewhere. It's a capstone monument on the national mall. All roads lead to Independence and Constitution. It's only a few blocks from the friggin' FDR memorial anyway -- and its not even real blocks. You can see one from the other.

A dirty trick would be putting billboards up giving the wrong date for an election, or bugging your own office and blaming it on a competitor. Someone editing a google map entry, is pretty weak on the 'dirty trick' scale.

He sells lots of books, gets a lot of money for a TV show and has many, many minions. Wait, how is he an idiot again?

Look, I have no use for the guy, but he's accomplishing more than you or me. We may not agree with what he's accomplishing, but that's irrelevant. I wish I had thought of it. *I* want minions, dammit! I need to find an underserviced fringe of my own to cater to.

You really think he believes half the shit he says? He's playing to the hyper-right niche. Same with Ann Coulter, or Michael Moore for a lefty example. They have targeted an audience and feed them what they want to hear. If Sarah Palin has any brain at all she'll just play the lecture circuit for the rest of her days and put out more books.

Oh, and people like him *LOVE* people like you. Your dislike and insults just play to his cause and give him legitimacy in the eyes of his target market.

TYT frequently rips open arguments with facts - and they do it to "both sides" [sorry if the links I posted don't have a lot of fact checking in them. I've been very critical of TYT but past clips do have plenty of facts to back up their claims]. Though lately it has been a lot of Fox News and republican bashing (can't really say there isn't a good reason for it lately).

That's the current definition of "concervative" in the US. Most of his viewers probably define themselves this way.

OK, prove your assertion. Specifically what makes Beck... or conservatives for that matter... racist? What makes him a nutjob? Be specific. You're making the accusations. The onus is on you to prove them.

If you don't agree with conservatism or don't like Beck, fine. But if you're going to accuse them of these things, man up and prove it. I see you've been modded informative when the only thing you've informed us is that you've made a bunch of accusations... some of them serious...without any citations.